How order delivery works
Alva Digital Downloads is notified the moment Shopify marks an order as paid. Once the payment notification arrives, Alva records the order and queues the delivery email. The whole sequence typically completes in under 30 seconds. Deliveries are buffered for reliability: if there is a brief slowdown, the notification waits and is retried until the order is successfully recorded.
Diagram placeholder: simple flow showing Shopify payment → Alva notification → order recorded → delivery email sent. Use Alva brand teal/blue. No vendor names. No real customer data.
Common reasons for delay
High order volume
During flash sales, Alva may be processing thousands of orders at once. Each order is handled in turn, so one placed at the back of a busy queue may take up to two minutes to appear.
Fraud check holding the email
When fraud checks are enabled, the order is placed in a fraud-review hold and delivery is paused until Shopify's Risk API responds. Most checks resolve in seconds; orders routed to manual review wait until you approve them. License keys are never assigned before fraud approval.
Large ZIP pack regeneration
If the product is a pack and one of its files changed since the last bundle was built, Alva regenerates the download archive before sending the email. Multi-gigabyte packs can take minutes.
Per-product email setting changed mid-flight
If you toggle a per-product email template or disable emails for a product while an order is in flight, Alva re-reads the product's email settings on the next processing attempt. The order still completes — the email simply uses the new rule.
Webhook retries from Shopify
Shopify retries a failed webhook up to 19 times over roughly 48 hours, backing off between attempts. If the first delivery hit Alva during a deploy, the order may not appear until the next retry succeeds — usually within 5–10 minutes.
What to do if it's been more than 5 minutes
Five minutes covers the vast majority of cases. Past that window, work this checklist:
- Confirm the order is marked as Paid in Shopify — pending or authorised orders do not trigger delivery.
- Open the Alva admin orders list. Held means fraud is gating delivery; Processing means the worker is still on it.
- Check Settings → Email to confirm email delivery is enabled and a verified sender is configured.
- If the order is missing entirely, fall back to Find a customer's download link to re-trigger delivery manually.
Frequently asked questions
Alva's delivery system buffers notifications during updates, outages, and traffic spikes so a paid order is never dropped. Each notification is only marked complete after the order is fully recorded.
No. The thank-you page uses a provisional download token from the checkout extension, so files appear instantly even before the payment notification has been fully processed.
Up to 19 times over roughly 48 hours, with exponential backoff. As long as Alva eventually returns success, the order processes normally.
See also
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Last updated 2026-05-06